More About Our Family

Friday, May 13, 2016

School Work

I have had this 'school' post in my draft folder for a while.

A little while ago Nick didn't want to go to school anymore. He said that it was too hard.
We talked about what was hard. And he was saying that everything was hard. This was a couple of months after his recess was limited to indoors for the short recess. But once the nice weather has returned he comes home with stories about who he played with all day. And while he isn't excited to go to school in the morning, he isn't upset about going anymore.

School is almost done for the year and with his surgery booked in June I think there is a good chance he will miss the last 2 weeks of grade one.

At Easter, Nick got a Star Wars Grade 1 Reading workbook. He was so excited and very interested in it. I wanted to get him the math version, but we couldn't find the grade 1 (but we got a grade 2 one for next year). If there is something he is interested in (and he loves Star Wars) then I want to work on that with him.

Nick has improved his reading over the last couple of months. He is more comfortable and confident in his ability to read. Instead of getting upset and saying that he 'can't' he is trying. He is sounding out words he doesn't know. He still gets frustrated and says he doesn't know. But he does know, and he does read the word.

He brings home a book every night to read at home, some nights the house is too hectic and we aren't able to do it, but most nights we get it read.

He is reading a level 10 (and ready to move up to 11 soon) and has worked so hard to get there! Now that he is progressing in his reading, he is excited to read his book!

Writing has to be the area that Nick has made the most progress. At the end of kindergarten writing was still very difficult for him and took a lot of time and energy. Nick has made incredible progress and his writing is better than Katheryn's!

The subject that Nickolas struggles with most, is math. This doesn't come as a surprise to us as math difficulties is very common in kids with spina bifida. He gives up and says that he can't do it. Nick is learning about coins this month, so I collected all of our coins and we talked about them and he could touch them and feel them and try to learn their names.
We also sing the Bubble Gum song we learned in camp, to help him to learn names of the coins (only we need to update it with the Toonie and Loonie)

We also got a math game that we can play at night. He tried it in the store and liked it. It is adding numbers from 1-9 with a dice. The object of the game was to roll the dice and count to put your peg at the right number and it is a 2-4 person game. Whoever gets 3 in a row wins. it is a fun way to help to memorize and learn addition. (And on the back is the same thing with multiplication 12x12, with larger dice)

We started on his workbook at the beginning to review the year. We have moved onto subtraction in his workbook and he is having a really hard time. He is having a hard time understanding the concept of taking away without counting anything. So I was thinking, what is small that he can count that won't fall off of his table. Lego is the easy answer.

I think that Nick has gotten better as we've been working on everything.
We have an hour of one-on-one time most nights as we do his bathroom routine. Instead of watching movies, we've been trying to off-set it with working on school work, especially if we can make it fun work. Over the last month or so I have seen improvements and gain more confidence.

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